How to choose a data centre
After a bad experience, I vowed to myself that I wouldn't be fooled again. I put on my Due Diligence Hat and sat down to determine how to choose a data centre.
Following are the major points which you absolutely cannot ignore if you hope to be successful. I wish I had this article when I was going about my business. Here, I hope to provide, in no particular order, a definitive list of investigation points.
In 2005, notebook computers accounted for 50.1 percent of all computer sales. In 2006, shelf space for notebooks increased 44 percent while desktop shelf space (and sales) went down by 23 percent. What does this have to do with a data centre? Everything.
At Journyx, where I manage IT, we presently have about 25 employees. Of those, 11 have laptops issued to them as their primary machine. One employee works remotely in another state. Therefore, half of our employees need constant remote access to our business. Well, it's possible they don't need it, but they sure do whine about it an awful lot when they don't have it. So for me, in my little fiefdom known as "IT," that pretty much amounts to the same thing.
As with most companies, we store the bulk of our data internally on our network here at the corporate headquarters, but we also store a fair bit of it at our data centre. We have Software as a Service (SaaS) applications which we host for our customers as well as for ourselves. We have our Web site, of course, which must be up and running 24/7 or my CEO calls me up in a panic. We have an FTP (file transfer protocol) server for support, as well as one for the public, etc. You get the picture. We've got resources that are needed by our remote employees as well as our customers. In essence, we need a reliable, 24/7, redundant, fast way for our people and the world to access our data. If this sounds familiar to you, you might be in the same boat that we were in. We needed a data centre.
